What the road back to resuming air travel will look like

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One of the biggest differences between now and a few months ago is that scheduled flights have almost ceased, from over 8 trillion kilometres travelled in 2019 (an average of over 1000 km per man, woman and child on the planet).

Recently I wrote 9 insights into the future of air travel in a post-coronavirus world, summarizing my thoughts on the potential pathways to the resumption of international travel.

A nice article last week in Business Insider on what air travel may look like after the pandemic drew on interviews with “a variety of travel experts, travel agents, and one futurist”, to include my thoughts.

Below are my comments that were featured in the article:
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The amazing opportunity of balancing home, office, and ‘third space’ work post-coronavirus

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A couple of days I was a guest on ABC’s The Drum program. One of the questions I was asked was the degree to which we will continue to work from home after the pandemic.

For my response watch the brief video below, or see the full program online, this segment starts at 45:00.

Below the video I describe in detail the forces shaping the relative roles of home, office, and ‘third space’ in a post-coronavirus future of work.
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Adaptability and entrepreneurial spirit will rebuild employment after over 100 million jobs are lost

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The chart below of weekly initial US unemployment claims puts into context the scope and scale of the economic and employment impact of the pandemic.

The long horizontal scale of chart, giving us temporal perspective, actually hides the extent of the problem, with the spike at the end in fact comprising three weeks of new unemployment claims of first 3.3 million and then the last two weeks at 6.6 million, for a total of 15.6 million.


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Could the pandemic lead to global cohesion and a maturing of humanity?

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When I searched my blog for mentions of pandemic, one mention came up in a post I wrote in 2014 on Four scenarios for 2030.

One of the scenarios from that exercise may be enormously relevant today.
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9 insights into the future of air travel in a post-coronavirus world

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Since I do significant work on the future of travel, I was sought out for an interview earlier today about the future of air travel, something very much up in the air at the moment, one could say!

Below are some of the points I shared with the journalist.
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Transitioning from the initial terror phase as new COVID-19 cases plateau in some countries

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The good news is that over the last week new cases are plateauing or even reducing in many countries, including Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Australia, and a range of Western European countries.

Of course new cases are still rising alarmingly in other countries, most notably the US, though also in UK, Canada, and France.

The chart below shows the last 10 days of data on new cases from a selection of countries, using two different scales to help make sense of the range of the data, and avoiding logarithmic scales as it is hard to visually interpret for this kind of data. Commentary on the implications below.
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The race heats up between Facebook and Apple to create the next big thing after smartphones

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News is just out that Facebook has locked up an exclusive deal with microLED leader Plessey to supply next-generation micro displays to power augmented reality glasses. Read on for the context and implications…

Beyond smartphones will likely be smartglasses

After the TV and desktop came the laptop and tablet and then the smartphone. The progress of our interfaces with technology and information will not end here. The most obvious contender for the immediate successor to the smartphone is some form of augmented reality glasses.

I have been writing about the potential of augmented reality glasses for over a decade, even being honored at the top of a list of ‘failed’ tech predictions for the 2010s for my prognostications in late 2009 of AR as a core form of human augmentation.
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9 implications of a dramatic shift to contactless commerce and society sparked by COVID-19

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Today, most countries in the world are enforcing social distancing and in many cases lockdowns, forcing people to stay at home, sometimes at pain of fines or imprisonment.

This is immensely challenging, but if executed well it will curtail the spread of the virus so we can move past the peak of infections into the next phase.
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Reviewing the debate on balancing privacy and health in a pandemic

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The issues I raised in my recent blog post We can stop the pandemic in its tracks, we just need to lose all privacy. Are we prepared for that? are, fortunately, becoming very much a topic of public debate.

Here are some of the more interesting articles that have recently emerged framing this very important conversation.
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Content series on strategy for a post-pandemic world

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There is only one topic today: the COVID-19 pandemic and its potential trajectory.

The scope of the pandemic is unprecedented in our lifetimes, and given how interconnected and interdependent our world is compared to previous generations, it is in many ways unique in human history.

In the coming months and likely beyond I will be focusing my thinking, content development, and strategy work on the medium to long-term systemic impact of the pandemic, and the actions we can take today to create a better future for ourselves, our organizations, and everyone.
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